270 East and West 
voiced, friendly, approachable little bird with 
charming ways and an attractive personal- 
ity, and though found in the wildest places, 
seems not to reflect its environment but to be 
a domestic creature. Often I have sat under 
the great ahuehuetls in some lonely barranca 
of southern Mexico, or in the sombre lava 
gorges of Arizona, and this pretty bird has 
played about me by the hour, pirouetting 
in the air, if one may use the expression, 
alighting on boulders, and uttering its gentle 
note. Under the ahuehuetls I have found its 
nest attached to the rock in phoebe fashion. 
The cafion wren is a gnome—full of wren 
conceits and whimsicalities—but with the 
manners and the instincts of a gnome. His 
tail is of burnished copper, his throat is 
white, and as he bobs about on the edge of a 
cliff you have a gleam of copper-red, a gleam of 
white, and then he throws back his head, 
opens his bill, and there falls as it were a little 
cascade of exquisite pearls—each one perfect 
—tricochetting from ledge to ledge, down, 
down, down. The falling pearls—the voice 
that would melt a heart of stone—that is the 
cafion wren. 
In the deep blue sky of the desert the red 
flycatcher gleams like a marvellous ruby. 
